While he ruled out cuts in salaries over the next pay round, he expected pay freezes to be the norm and bonuses to be sharply down. He said: “When I meet my fellow chairmen, we say pay has got out of line, it’s too high. We recognise the social pressure and say, ‘What shall we do about it?’.”

They’ve been getting people in and giving them a ticking off

RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton

He said the problem stemmed back over the past 10 to 20 years, when bonuses became “entrenched as an expectation” rather than an exception.

But he added the “rhetoric around big business” had to change. He said: “Business is the only source of wealth for the country.”